Swiss engineering company ABB Group was contracted to work on Kusile in 2015.
Swedish-Swiss engineering giant ABB has been fined four million Swiss francs (R75 million) for bribery related to the construction of a huge power plant in South Africa, Switzerland announced on Friday.
The attorney general’s office said Switzerland-based ABB Management Services admitted failing to take “all necessary and reasonable steps” to prevent bribery payments to officials in South Africa.
“Several ABB employees started since 2013 a bribery scheme to obtain orders, through excessive payments to subcontractors, for the construction of a coal-fired power plant in South Africa,” the attorney general’s office said.
The construction near Johannesburg of the Kusile power station, the world’s fourth-largest coal-fired generator, has been plagued by allegations of corruption. The South African electric power company, Eskom, commissioned the plant in 2007.
“ABB South Africa received orders worth at least $200 million with bribe payments of at least 1.3 million Swiss francs,” the attorney general’s office said.
As a result, it said that ABB had been fined 4 million Swiss francs and ordered the group to pay 50,000 Swiss francs for the cost of the procedure.
The firm has already made a $104 million compensation payment in South Africa, the attorney general’s office said.
On Thursday, South African prosecutors announced that ABB would pay more than 2.5 billion rand in “punitive remedies” to South Africa for “criminal conduct” at Eskom.
READ | Eskom corruption: multinational ABB to pay SA R2.5bn for dubious deal with Kusile
Switzerland said the US justice department and the Securities and Exchange Commission were also expected to settle with ABB on Friday.
In October, eight people, including Eskom’s former chief executive Matshela Koko, were arrested on corruption charges related to a multi-billion dollar contract with the Swedish-Swiss firm.
